Wednesday, July 31, 2013

This movie came in a boxed
set of spaghetti westerns with the Dollars
trilogy which is odd marketing because it is not in fact a spaghetti. For one
thing, there is an attempt to address a moral question. So that disqualifies it
immediately.

For another, the dialogue
and sound are recorded in situ and
the film is not dubbed. There is no stylized exaggerated violence (apart from
the hangings), nor any Leone wide screen ultra-close-ups. It was filmed in New
Mexico with American character actors. It was directed by an American TV show
director and produced by Malpaso and the Hawaii
5-0 people. Hell, it even had Ed
Begley in it.In the very first scene we have one of the oldest Western tropes of all as the hero is kind to an animal. Obviously a goody. So clearly we are not dealing with the grunting spaghetti killer we had become used to Clint giving us over there in Europe.

Spag titles

Yes, it did have certain
spaghetti influences but they are kept to a minimum.

So that’s a relief. Clint
is hanged before the titles, which is a bit of a surprise. They do The Ox-Bow Incident in 9 minutes, though
forget the quality part. Ben Johnson cuts him down alive (just) but then sadly
is written out. What a wonderful Western actor Johnson was but how often he was misused or wasted.

Ben the Great

Clint is ‘Marshal Cooper’, not called Coop (as the hero is in, say, Tell Them Willie Boy Is Here) so we
forgive him, and he signs on with Hanging ‘Judge Fenton’ (Pat
Hingle) at ‘Fort Grant’ (only the names have been changed to protect the
guilty). Of course he uses the badge to hunt his lynch mob, led by Capt. Ed
Begley. Lynching is such an appalling, base and cowardly crime that we have no
sympathy for the perpetrators, especially when they decide to forestall arrest
and try to kill Clint again. That is just plain naughty.

Marshal Cooper blasts 'em

Just as, in a way, any war
film is inevitably an anti-war film (it is enough to show war), so any film
that shows a hanging in detail becomes an anti-capital punishment statement.
The multiple hangings ordered by Judge Fenton (obviously based on Isaac Parker),
with their The Bravados/True Grit-style
festive audience, beer vendors, children watching, and, worst of all, a
clergyman officiating at the celebrations with hymns and prayers, are enough to
turn the stomach of even a fan of the death penalty.

Revolting

In the dialogue Clint compares
the judge’s hangings to lynching and you do wonder, especially when two teenage
boys found quickly guilty of stealing a few cows but not murder are ritually strangled.

Good old Ed

We have some excellent
actors. Everyone loves Ed Begley and you should see him when Clint comes for
his revenge. Fear, panic and terror drip from his pores. Those white eyebrows
reach for the sky. He is incompetent evil personified.

And then, oh joy, we have Bruce Dern. Now Bruce Dern has to be a candidate for the 'Best Baddy in Westerns' Award.
There ought to be a Western Badman Hall of Fame and if there were, Bruce would
reign supreme. Only Richard Boone came close. As soon as I see Mr. Dern in the
credits, I know we are in for a good time. Quentin Tarantino knew this too and
that is why he included him in his recent Django Unchained and The Hateful 8. The only serious philosophical question for debate is, is he eviler in The Cowboys or Will Penny? My personal favorite is Last Man Standing. Is there a Bruce Dern fan club? There must be. I
need to be elected President.

Bruce the Great

Why is Inger Stevens always
a boarding house (or whorehouse) lady? Firecreek,
5 Card Stud, Hang ‘em High, she was always to be seen in a
boarding/cathouse. Odd. And she always had 1960s blonde hair. Oh well.

Sitting in her boarding house

Bob Steele is the only
decent member of the lynch party. Good old Bob, we always like to see him. LQ
Jones is there in the mob too. And Dennis Hopper is a crazed preacher shot down
(reluctantly) by Marshal Ben Johnson. So we have some old friends here. Not
like spaghettis.

Bob Steele, old friend

The photography’s OK
(Richard Kline and Leonard South) and the quality of the print very good; the
music (Dominic Frontiere), however, is not. When Clint is making out with
over-made-up Inger, the music is such romantic slush it could have been lifted
from a Doris Day film.

The screenplay (Leonard
Freeman & Mel Goldberg) and direction (Ted Post, the Rawhide guy) are the weakest links. Characters were supposed to
develop and show complexity with two scenes and six lines of dialogue. Can’t be
done. Post was essentially a TV director, and it shows.

So it’s a proper Western,
not a trash spaghetti. It’s just not a very good one. A pity because in the
right hands it could have had a lot to say.

It was a million times
better than the Leone junk Eastwood had been doing and curiously, after it he
went backwards. The Don Siegel-directed Two Mules for Sister Sara that he did two years later, for example, was much more
spaghetti than this one. It wasn’t really until Joe Kidd in 1972 that Clint
starred in a really good Western and began his climb to greatness via Josey Wales and Pale Rider to the magnificent Unforgiven.

Tuesday, July 30, 2013

Even while Wild Bill Hickok was
alive, and ever since his dramatic death, tall tales and exaggerations of his
exploits have been common. As was the case with all noted figures of the West,
be they outlaws, lawmen or somewhere in between, the number of men they fought
or killed has been grossly inflated. Just as with Jesse James, Billy the Kid, Wyatt Earp
and countless others, the fictional Wild Bill has so far cast the factual one
in shadow as to make the true person unknown.

Hollywood in particular latched
onto Wild Bill as a perfect subject for Westerns and his character
appeared in silent movies, programmers, serials and major A-pictures. He
appeared on the big screen
40 times, that I know of, and in 153 TV shows. That’s a lot of screen Bills. He
has been impersonated by actors as diverse as William S Hart, Gary Cooper, Roy
Rogers, Wild Bill Elliott, Forrest Tucker, Guy Madison, Charles Bronson, LQ
Jones, David Carradine, and both father and son, Lloyd and Jeff Bridges.

Out of all
these appearances (I do not count here the TV documentaries), not a single one
has accurately shown us the true James Butler Hickok (1837 – 76).

1.The fact

To get at the real (but no less
interesting) Wild Bill, we need to read Joseph G Rosa. Mr. Rosa, an Englishman
from Middlesex, devoted his life to the subject and he is by far the most
authoritative and reliable of Bill’s biographers. He wrote many books but
the key text is They Called Him Wild Bill:
The Life and Times of James Butler Hickok, University of Oklahoma Press,
Norman, which was first published in 1964 and then revised after more research in
1974. It is an admirable book, scholarly yet readable, obviously deeply
researched, balanced, clear, factual and fascinating.

Fine book - you won't do better

Early life

James Butler Hickok was born in
Homer (now Troy Grove), Illinois on May 27, 1837, the fourth son of farmers William
Alonzo and Polly Butler Hickok. He received schooling (though all his life his
spelling was to be basically phonetic) and as a boy developed a passion for and
skill with firearms. He was also imbued with his parents’ detestation of
slavery and helped southern slaves escape to the safety of Canada through the ‘underground
railway’. James was a lifelong anti-slaver.

Kansas

In 1856 James and his brother
Lorenzo set out for Kansas to establish a claim on farmland. For some unknown
reason, James was often known in the family as Bill. Lorenzo was known as ‘Tame
Bill’ and was of a different character. He soon returned home, leaving James to
make his way in Kansas. James became involved in the Free State movement and
joined James H Lane’s Free State Army, which he stayed with for about a year.

In 1857 he first met William
Cody, known as Buffalo Bill, and began their lifelong friendship. He stayed at
the Cody home in Leavenworth for several months.

Buffalo Bill Cody as a young man

In March 1858 James, not yet 21, was elected
Constable of Monticello in Johnson Country. It was his first experience as a peace officer. He farmed at the same time and made
a claim on land. At the end of ’58 he left Monticello, apparently because of an
unsuccessful affair with a girl, Mary Owen.

James got a job as a freighter
and coach driver. When in 1860 Cody became a rider for the new Pony Express, James
was too tall and big to join him (they only hired youths and slight men) and instead continued with his transportation work. It is
at this time that he was said to have fought a grizzly bear and killed it with
his knife, being, however, severely mauled. In September, Indians attacked a
station and drove off stock; James led a successful raid to recover the animals,
with Cody along too.

The McCanles affair

In July 1861 Hickok was involved
in the first of his several famous shooting scrapes. As far as we can ascertain,
the facts, according to Rosa, were these: David C McCanles, whose mistress Sarah
Shull had perhaps been dallying with Hickok, came to the Pony Express station
at Rock Creek to demand payment of money he was owed by the company, and was fatally
shot from inside the building as he entered, perhaps by Hickok or by the superintendent,
Horace Wellman.

Dave McCanles. He looks a bit like Pavarotti.

Two of McCanles’s supporters then
rushed the station. Hickok shot and wounded one, James Woods, and then Mrs. Wellman,
crazed, screaming, “Kill them! Kill them all!” attacked and killed the injured
Woods with a grubbing hoe. She then made a rush at McCanles’s son, Monroe,
12, who ran away and escaped. The other McCanles partisan, James Gordon, received a
shot in the body, it is not clear from whom, and staggered away. Two company
men, Doc Brink and George Hulbert, pursued him and one of them killed him with
a shotgun beside a creek. Thus three men had died, one of them possibly, but not
certainly, killed by Hickok. In a subsequent hearing, Hickok was cleared of
murder. Mrs. Wellman was not even charged and appeared as a witness.

Immediately, the affair was written
up, discussed and exaggerated and Hickok’s reputation as a deadly gunman was
established.

The war

Mr. Rosa has uncovered a lot
more than was previously known about Hickok’s role in the Civil War. Although
he joined the Union Army as a teamster, Hickok soon became a scout and spy
behind enemy lines. He was especially active in the Battle of Westport in 1864.

He became celebrated for his
daring and it was during the war that he became known as Wild Bill.

Dave Tutt

In July 1865, about a month
after being mustered out, Wild Bill got into a gunfight with Davis K Tutt in
Springfield, Missouri. They had been on bad terms for some time. One theory
says that Bill had got Tutt’s sister pregnant. Another says that Hickok and
Tutt were rivals for the affections of Susannah Moore. Owed money by Bill after
card games, Tutt took Bill’s watch. Bill warned him not to wear it but Tutt
flaunted it the next day on the public square. Bill warned Tutt not to cross
the square but he did. They both pulled pistols and fired as one. Tutt’s shot
missed but Hickok’s hit him in the heart.

Wild Bill fights Dave Tutt in Springfield Missouri, 1865

A warrant was issued for Hickok
for the killing though the charge was later reduced to manslaughter. Bill was
tried and acquitted. Juries held to the Western code of a fair fight. Press reaction was,
however, quite negative to Bill.

Added to the McCanles affair of
four years earlier, the killing of Dave Tutt made Wild Bill’s reputation grow
by leaps and bounds. This surge in notoriety received a huge boost when Bill
met a certain Colonel George Ward Nichols, who later wrote up Bill’s life in lurid
and exaggerated terms in an article for the widely-read Harper’s Weekly magazine. For years afterwards, Bill was known in the
press as ‘Wild Bill, of Harper’s fame.’ He was a celebrity.

Deputy US Marshal Hickok

In 1866 Wild Bill was appointed
a deputy US marshal at Fort Riley and captured deserters and mule thieves. He signed
on as a scout for General Sherman and also acted as a guide for tourists on the
plains. At this time he got to know California Joe (Moses Milner), scout, gunfighter, trapper, gold digger; the Welsh-American journalist and explorer HM Stanley; and
General George Armstrong Custer, for whom he scouted in ’67.

California Joe

Henry Morton Stanley

In 1868 Deputy US Marshal Hickok escorted some prisoners from Hays City to Topeka, accompanied by Bill Cody. A young boy met him and was enormously impressed: it was Bill Tilghman, later to become one of the greatest (though least celebrated) Western lawmen. Hickok then scouted for the 10th Cavalry but missed the
Washita and was snowed up on the Canadian River with General Penrose. He was
rescued by Buffalo Bill.

Bill Tilghman as a young man (he was a buffalo hunter at 15)

In 1869 Bill was wounded by Indians
and left the scouts. He made his base in Hays and in August was elected sheriff
of Ellis County. In August he fatally shot Bill Mulrey (or Mulvey) and in
September he killed Samuel Strawhun in a saloon brawl. In October he prevented a
lynching in Hays. But in November he lost the election to succeed himself and
left for Topeka.

In 1870 he was back in Hays and
got into a fight with some 7th Cavalry troopers in which he killed one and
wounded another. He left town in a hurry ahead of irate citizens, and gambled in
Topeka.

Abilene

In April 1871 he accepted the
job as marshal of the booming and lawless cattle town of Abilene. Although one
of his predecessors was a certain Tom Smith, Mr. Rosa is not sure that this was
in fact the famous ‘Bear River’ Tom Smith, as is usually thought.

John Wesley Hardin

Hickok’s tenure lasted barely
seven months but in that period at different times he came up against Texas
gunmen John Wesley Hardin, Ben Thompson and Phil Coe. Mr. Rosa discounts the
story that Hardin got the drop on Hickok with a ‘border roll’, putting it down
to Hardin’s boastful autobiography. There was no love lost between Ben Thompson
and Hickok and it is possible that Thompson tried to get Hardin to brace the
marshal. In any case, Thompson left for Texas to get his wife but was involved in
a bad buggy accident and never returned.

Ben Thompson

Bill kept the lid on Abilene,
enforcing a no-gun ordinance and confining the worst excesses to the area known
as the ‘Devil’s Addition’ north of the tracks. He was admired by many grateful Abilene residents but did enough to earn the hatred
of the Texans who regarded Abilene as ‘theirs’.

Phil Coe

6 foot 4 inch Phil Coe deserted
from the Confederate army after one day, having struck an officer, and went to Mexico to fight for
Maximilian. There he met and befriended fellow Texan Ben Thompson. Coe became a saloon man and eventually arrived in Abilene. On
October 5, he was with a mob of Texans outside The Alamo saloon. There Coe
discharged his revolver. Marshal Hickok came running and demanded to know who
had fired in contravention of the no-gun law. Coe said he had shot at a stray
dog. The marshal told the mob to disperse and when they roared in protest he
shot Coe twice in the abdomen (he died in agony two days later). Just at that
moment a friend of Hickok’s, a special deputy (though not Hickok’s deputy)
named Mike Williams, rushed round the corner and Hickok instantly and
instinctively fired again and Williams was killed.

Phil Coe

Once again, reports were
magnified and erroneous. Hickok had “shot down two policemen in cold blood”, and so on.
Texans put a price on Hickok’s head. Bill foiled three would-be murderers on a rail
trip to Topeka. Bill was crushed by what he had unwittingly done and it was not
long before he left Abilene. In any case the anti-cattle-trade reformers were
gaining ground and there was a strong anti-Hickok party forming. He was
dismissed on December 13.

In 1872 Bill was in Georgetown,
Colorado with his loyal friend Charley Utter and he then went to Kansas City where he
met Col. Sidney Barnett who persuaded him to take part in a 'grand buffalo
chase', a sort of Wild West show, in Niagara Falls at the end of August. In
September he visited the Kansas City Exposition where he enraged some Texans by
refusing to let the band play Dixie. Rosa discounts, however, the story that he
foiled Jesse James’s raid on the box office – the James gang got clear
away.

The person on the left has been variously identified but is most commonly thought to be Colorado Charley Utter, Wild Bill's good friend

The murder of Chief Whistler

Later that year Wild Bill was
blamed for the murder of the Indian chief Whistler and two other Indians but
Rosa is clear that the ‘Wild Bill’ concerned was not Hickok. There were several
‘Wild Bills’ on the frontier.

Show business

In the fall of 1873 Hickok was persuaded to
join Bill Cody and Texas Jack Omohundro back East on the stage in their
enormously popular shows about life on the plains. Hickok was a poor actor and
disliked making an exhibition of himself. In 1874 he left the show.

Wild Bill Hickok, Texas Jack Omohundro and Buffalo Bill Cody at the time of their theatrical collaboration

Agnes

Bill had first met Agnes Lake
Thatcher, an accomplished circus equestrienne, in Hays but while she had been
enthusiastic, he had been less so. Now, however, they took up together, and they
continued a long correspondence when Bill left again for the plains. He acted
as guide for rich tourists and by 1875 was gambling in Cheyenne. There his name appeared on a list of those liable to arrest for vagrancy. His eyesight was giving him trouble and Mr. Rosa discusses
all the possible causes. Bill appears to have been photophobic and he started
wearing tinted glasses.

Agnes Lake Thatcher, Mrs. JB Hickok

In March 1876, Bill and Agnes
were married by a Methodist minister in Cheyenne. They honeymooned in Agnes’s
home town of Cincinnati and then Bill, eager to make money, left again to make
a strike in the Black Hills. Together with Charley Utter and Charley’s brother
Steve, they set off for Deadwood, where they arrived in July ’76. Bill wrote genuinely tender letters to Agnes while there.

Calamity Jane

Mr. Rosa completely discounts
the story of a romance between Martha Jane Cannary, Calamity Jane, and Wild
Bill. Still less is it likely that they married. There is no evidence at all
for any relationship and it is improbable in the extreme. In any case Jane was
not in Deadwood when Bill was killed (as many movies show).

Calamity Jane

Murder

On Wednesday, August 2, 1876,
Wild Bill Hickok was shot in the back of the head while playing cards in
Nuttall & Mann’s No. 10 saloon by one ‘Bill Sutherland’ whose real name
turned out to be Jack McCall. Wild Bill was supposed to have been holding aces and eights, ever after known as the dead man's hand.

Dead man's hand

No one will ever know the
complete truth about why Wild Bill was killed. Jack McCall took the secret to the gallows with him.
But it seems likely that he was paid to do it, possibly by one John or Johnny Varnes.
At one point McCall named Varnes, who had once fallen foul of Hickok in Denver and
the animosity was increased by a confrontation over a game of poker in Deadwood
when Bill had interfered in a dispute between Varnes and another man. A marshal
was sent to find Varnes but he had disappeared. The matter was never pursued and no one knows what happened to Varnes. After
being acquitted by a miners’ kangaroo court in Deadwood right after the murder, McCall
was properly tried in Yankton and hanged there in March 1877.

The only known picture of Jack McCall

Bill received a proper funeral in
Deadwood paid for by his pardner Charley Utter.

The Prince of Pistoleers

Wild Bill Hickok thus lived a
short but remarkable life and one wonders why it should be necessary to invent nonsense
about him in movies. Scout, spy, lawman, gambler, marksman supreme, his life
was charged with excitement, danger and action.

We still await the true Wild
Bill on the screen. Sadly, it is too late now to have Joseph Rosa as historical consultant on the set.

In a later post, Wild Bill Hickok in fact and fiction, part 2/2: the fiction, we’ll look at
how Wild Bill has been presented to us in serious novels, pulp fiction and on the screen.

Sunday, July 28, 2013

Set in West Texas (as was
the Coen brothers’ first movie, Blood
Simple) in 1980 – a piece of dialogue about a coin situates it exactly in
that year - No Country for Old Men tells, faithfully, Cormac McCarthy’s story of a drugs deal
gone wrong which develops into a complex pursuit-Western noir. It’s a stunningly good book. I
remember I bought it in 2005 the day it came out in Borders in Flagstaff, AZ and I read it while staying at the Plaza Hotel in Las Vegas, NM. Little did I know that the very same hotel (called the 'Eagle' and on the Mexican border) would figure in the movie only two years later. It's a great hotel, by the way, and I recommend it.

The
hero (of a kind), Llewelyn Moss, excellently played by Josh Brolin, is a tough, independent
cowboy. He's a trailer-park rube but he manages some pretty Western maneuvers and he goes his own way.

The ordinary guy who is out of his depth

Ed Tom Bell, the decent country sheriff who is after him, as much to
protect him as jail him, is marvelously interpreted by the actor who dominates,
Tommy Lee Jones. Mr. Jones is a Texas man and a rancher and was the perfect
choice. The role moves seamlessly on from his wonderful Pete in The Three Burials of Melquiades Estradaof
two years before. He is an actor capable of great subtlety, as this part
required.

World-weary, wry, out of time

As Anton Chigurh, the
enigmatic, scary hitman after Llewellyn, with his sinister air cylinder, Spanish actor Javier
Bardem, in his 70s haircut, is superb. He is creepy and chilling. When he was
approached by the Coens, he said "I don't
drive, I speak bad English, and I hate violence." The Coens responded,
"That's why we called you."

When he learned about the haircut he had to wear, Javier Bardem said he wouldn't get laid for months afterwards. The Coens high-fived their success, for the hairstyle adds wonderfully to the weirdo effect.

Curiously for the narrative
and unusually for a Western, these three principals never meet. On one level
you’ve just got a druggy crime story with an amoral bad guy, a decent cop and a
dumb redneck - the ugly, the good and the bad, you might say - and you root for Llewelyn,
the ordinary guy doing his best but out of his depth. But with writers and
directors as sensitive as the Coens and with a base novel as truly great as Mr.
McCarthy’s, this film goes far beyond
that. Book and film leave you with a hard knot of coldness in your stomach.

The greatest living American novelist

The West Texas country of
the title (a lot shot in New Mexico) is harshly beautiful and there are wide exteriors finely photographed
by Oscar-nominated Roger Deakins (who did outstanding work on The Assassination of Jesse James…the same year). He paints with light.

Carter Burwell’s lean,
low-key music is subtle and sparsely used, underlining the aridity of the
landscape and theme.

Of the support actors, all
are top class. As Moss’s wife, Kelly MacDonald, a Glaswegian, has a completely
convincing West Texas accent (it comes as a real surprise to hear her real
voice). The great Barry Corbin is Bell’s aged mentor, and a scene where Sheriff Bell
visits with him is reminiscent (deliberately or not, I don’t know) of Gary Cooper talking to his elderly predecessor Lon Chaney Jr. in High Noon. Woody Harrelson, who was so
fine as Big Boy Matson in The Hi-Lo Country, is the hitman sent after
the hitman. In the novel, Sheriff Bell says of the dope-dealers,
Here a while back in San Antonio they shot and killed a federal
judge. (No quotation marks. It's McCarthy). In 1979, Federal Judge John H Wood Jr. was in fact shot and killed
in San Antonio, Texas. Free-lance contract killer Charles Harrelson, Woody’s
father, was convicted of the crime. I suppose this was deliberately Coenesque
casting, clever, apt, slightly creepy.

Woody Harrelson, son of a hitman, as the hitman sent after the hitman

There are the scariest motel scenes since Psycho.

In some ways it’s a kind of Texas Fargo, with small town folk swept up into major crime, but really
it’s an anti-Fargo, hot and southern,
not snowy and northern, with chilling, inexorable, lethal criminals rather
than comically inept hitmen.There's a fine portrayal of courage when Ed Tom Bell enters a darkened motel room at night, fearing that the killer is within. He demonstrates that true courage is not the absence of fear but being afraid and doing it anyway.

This is a dark film and the
humor (for there is humor) is appropriately black. Actually, the America they
show is no damn country for anyone. As is to be expected from the Coen brothers,
the direction, writing and editing are outstanding. The picture won four Oscars
(best picture, best direction, best writing and best supporting actor for
Bardem) and was nominated for four more.

The movie is very violent
but it is essentially about violence.
From Ed Tom Bell’s opening speech on, there is a lack of comprehension how anyone
can be so violent and evil and why. It
is also about aging and the passing of time, as the title suggests. WB Yeats
in Sailing to Byzantium put it poetically,
That is no country for old men. Sheriff
Bell says, "It starts when you begin to overlook
bad manners. Anytime you quit hearin' 'sir' and 'ma'am’, the end is pretty much
in sight." He sounds kinda like your grandpappy and you nod tolerantly at
the old boy. But we very soon realize that it’s gone way past
that. Chigurh’s depredations are beyond all hope for
decency, and Ed Tom Bell comes to understand that. Later, Bell and his old El Paso
counterpart (Rodger Boyce) put it more earthily: “It’s just goddam beyond everything.”

Saturday, July 27, 2013

Jaws meets Moby
Dick on the Plains. Great white shark, a white whale, a white buffalo?
White elephant, more like.

The
Quint-Ahab figure is Wild Bill Hickok, no less and he partners up with Crazy
Horse to hunt down the albino buffalo. So it’s obviously based on fact, huh. The
“white spike” is haunting Mr. Hickok’s dreams and so he has to kill it. Mr.
Horse needs to kill it because it gored his daughter to death and she cannot
rest in the spirit world unless he does. Or something.

Although
I make an exception for the great Dead Man, I dislike mumbo-jumbo Westerns. Quite good ones, like The Last Hunt (also about a white buffalo) or The Missing, come close to being spoiled by stupid magic and
hocus-pocus. The White Buffalo isn’t
half as good as those movies and the mumbo-j. effectively sinks it.

Charles Bronson
is Wild Bill. We are in 1874 and apparently Hickok, fresh from his appearances
on the stage with Buffalo Bill, took the name James Otis and set off to the
Dakotas by train to track down and kill the white buffalo that charges him in
his nightmares. He is aging, has syphilis and his eyesight is failing. He
wears cool shades. He wears long hair, dandy clothes and has two large pistols
in the red sash around his waist. He was obviously traveling incognito.

He looks so like Wild Bill

Amazingly,
he is recognized and there is some bunkum about Tom Custer (Ed Lauter), the
general’s brother, wanting to kill him. Still, it gives the excuse for a
gunfight in which soldiers can be shot. Tom makes a run for it.

Will
Sampson, a Creek, is Crazy Horse (renamed Worm until he kills the buff) and is
quite good, as far as the script allows anyway.

Crazy Horse aka Worm

One
problem is the buffalo itself, which is too evidently in those pre-CGI days a lumbering
mechanical device on hidden tracks with smoke blowing from its nostrils. The
shark was scarier. Actually, it rather resembles a cuddly toy. They do all the
charges in slo-mo, maybe to make it look more ‘realistic’ (because as we know
buffalo always charge in slow motion) but all that does is give us more time to
notice how fake the beast is. Maybe it was more impressive on the wide screen
in a theater. Maybe.

Rather like an angry lamb

The
slogan on the posters was “You won’t believe your eyes!” Well, indeed, they
were right, we didn’t.

The
movie was expensively filmed in Colorado but a large amount is done in the
studio and that looks even faker.

So I’m
afraid it’s not awfully good.

It does
have its points though. There’s a good scene in a crowded saloon where Bill and
his old-timer pard, one-eyed Charlie Zane (Jack Warden, rather good) take on a
band of hide hunter toughs and blast them to hell. These toughs are the
henchpersons of Whistling Jack Kileen, an excellent Clint Walker, meaner and
heavier than usual and quite convincing. You wouldn’t want to tangle with
Whistling Jack Kileen, though of course Wild Bill doesn’t mind.

They seem to be having fun. I fear it won't last.

We have
good old Douglas Fowley as the train conductor in his last Western movie of 64
(and countless TV shows). Slim Pickens drives the stage and actually I think he
is on the same run he was on in the remake of Stagecoach. They put an undertaker in the story and of course only John
Carradine, typecast in that role, would do. Stuart Whitman (Marshal Crown from Cimarron Strip, also in The Man from the Alamo, Seven Men from Now,
The Comancheros, etc) is there, and
Kim Novak, in her second Western of two, plays Poker Jenny with whom Bill
declines to, er, canoodle on the grounds of the ‘dose’ he says one of Jenny’s ‘scarlet
sisters’ gave him (her fault, obviously).

Cadaverous Carradine (left)

So there
are a few familiar faces to enjoy.

But
Englishman J Lee Thompson, the Guns of
Navarone and King Solomon’s Mines
fellow, couldn’t direct Westerns, as the other one he did, Mackenna’s Gold, proved.Bronson made the movie as part of a contract with Dino De Laurentis, who didn't understand Westerns, as was demonstrated by the other De Laurentis/Bronson one, Chino.